Exercise files

Quick reference

Cards

Working with Cards and Multi-row Cards in Power BI.

When to use

Cards and multi-row cards are useful for showing summary statistics. Single point cards are also especially useful, as they can be used to set alerts in the Power BI service, where multi-row cards cannot.

Instructions

Creating Cards

Select the card (or multi-row card) visual

Drag a measure into the Fields area in the Visualizations pane

Be aware the Cards can only have one field where multi-row cards can have many fields

Advantages of Cards over Multi-Row cards

You can change the name displayed on a card (multi-row inherit the raw measure name only)

Multi-row card have very limited formatting options (no alignment, all measures must be same color, etc..)

Changing name displayed on a card

Turn off the Category Label

Turn on the Title and name the card appropriately

Format as desired

Hints & tips

Tricks for formatting and aligning cards

Format the card text size under the Data Label group

Format the card titles under the Title group

Turn on gridlines (View -> Gridlines) for easier alignment

Align multiple cards by holding down the CTRL key (Shift does not work) then go to Visual Tools -> Format -> Align

00:05In this video, we're going to look at cards and multirow cards.

00:11What card is Is it's the idea that we want to put out a single

00:15data point whether it's a key performance indicator or

00:18key metric of some kind, we want a nice little bullet point that shows us a value.

00:24So to create a card, we go and click on the one, two, three.

00:28This is a single point card,

00:29which will allow one single point of data, like sales.

00:34Now, I might wanna modify this and make it look a little bit different.

00:37So I'm gonna go and fool around with that right now by clicking the paintbrush icon.

00:42I have the option to play with the data label and you'll notice that if I

00:45change the size on this thing and I shrink it down, the $5 million will change.

00:49So I can change this up.

00:50I can say, I'd like to make this run a nice 20 point.

00:54I can change the display on this and the point that I wanna make here is that if

00:58I look at the sales measure and I go back to the modeling table,

01:01you'll notice the display is with zero decimal places.

01:05I can actually change this here to say I'd like to show this in thousands

01:10with two decimal places.

01:12And it will actually do that, regardless of what it says over here.

01:16And that's kind of an important thing, we get granular control.

01:18I'm going to shrink this guy down a second, and

01:22then I want to take a look at the category label.

01:24The category label is the thing that's showing on the bottom here.

01:26This is the name of the measure.

01:28Now, I could rename this if I wanted to, but

01:31I don't really have a lot of options to play around with to push this to the top.

01:35Maybe I want to see it above.

01:37So I'm going to turn this off.

01:39And then what I'm going to do, is I'm going to come up to a title,

01:42turn it on and give my measure a nice new title that says Sales $.

01:46It's the same as what I have for the measure, but

01:48I really want it above my card.

01:52I'm gonna change the font color to a nice black.

01:55I think I'll change the background to yellow.

01:59You'll see I get a nice little bar across the top, I'll align it center, and

02:03then maybe I'll change the font size out to a nice say,

02:05I don't know how about a 20 point?

02:07And now I've got a nice little summary card that I can actually go and

02:11put in the top of my dashboard, somewhere nicely that looks pretty cool.

02:15And again it's all cross filterable as you would expect and

02:18as I drill into different things it will change.

02:20But it gives me that nice data point that I need.

02:24What else might I wanna do with this?

02:26Well you know what?

02:27What if I wanted to see more data points what's the purpose of a multirow card?

02:31The multirow card is this one here.

02:34And if I click on him and I said, show me sales, and show me say, budgets.

02:40You'll notice that it puts the values on here.

02:43Now you'll notice as well that the budget is actually showing me 499.8

02:47on a decimal basis there and sales is not.

02:50And this is because when I go back to the budget measure,

02:55it's using a general currency, and that means that with auto decimal place,

02:59that means that somewhere there is a 0.8.

03:01Sales, is being forced to zero decimal places but

03:04I'd like to see them consistent in my multi-row card.

03:07So I'll go to the formatting tab, and I'll go take a look at the data labels.